Norway: Oil and gas rookie on par with big players

Norwegian safety watchdog, the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA), has given Norwegian continental shelf newcomer Pandion Energy a clean bill of health as a production license holder.

The PSA said on Wednesday that it conducted an audit of Pandion Energy on May 25, 2018. Pandion Energy is a private oil and gas company with interests in licenses on the Norwegian continental shelf, headquartered in Oslo, which recently acquired several offshore oil fields.

The safety watchdog carried out the audit to verify that Pandion had a management system and exercised practical follow-up of its role as a licensee in accordance with Norwegian legislation and that the company possessed robust competence and capacity.

The offshore safety watchdog added that it found no non-conformities or improvement points during the audit.

Pandion was founded in November 2016 to perform a management buyout of the operational platform and licenses of Tullow Oil Norge AS, previously named Spring Energy Norway AS.

In June 2017, Pandion Energy was pre-qualified as a licensee on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) and received an approval for the acquisition of all licenses in Tullow Oil Norge’s existing portfolio including a 20% interest in PL 636 containing the Cara oil and gas discovery.

Pandion acquired assets through the acquisition of licenses from Tullow Oil Norge AS, the purchase of shares in the Valhall and Hod production licenses from Aker BP, and in connection with awards in predefined areas (APA 2017).

The company has shares in ten production licenses. Namely, six of them are exploration licenses, one is a development license while the remaining three (Valhall PL 006 B, Valhall PL 033 B, and Hod PL 003) are currently producing.

Pandion is backed by Kerogen Capital, an independent private equity fund manager specializing in the international upstream oil and gas sector.